Mark Nickolas on NPR’s Marketplace

By Mark Nickolas, on Mon Jul 15, 2013 at 12:30 PM ET

Friend of RP Mark Nickolas has hit the big time. His short film on Occupy Wall Street, and the famous bull that sits near the stock exchange, was the feature of a Kai Ryssdal story on NPR’s “Marketplace.”

Forget Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon or Warren Buffett. For the past 23 years, there’s been only one non-stop observer to Wall Street’s goings-ons.

The Charging Bull of Wall Street, the iconic 7,000-pound bronze sculpture, sits just a couple of blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. And is pictured in media reports, movies and just about any other popular representation of U.S. financial markets.

“He’s still just a temporary installation. There’s a city ordinance that says you can’t have a private work of art that’s on public property for more than a year,” says Mark Nickolas. “And I think they’ve just turned a blind eye to that rule.”

Nickolas says his movie is told from the point of view of the bull and so, perhaps, can personify Wall Street and New York in a very physical way:

“The fact that the Occupy protests actually began Vancouver, Canada, from his point of view as a New Yorker, there is this sense of ‘how can you target me? I began as a work of art, and who’s Canada to be lecturing us about protesting government.”